Trout is an audio player that DC member Skwire started writing as an entry to our NANY (New Apps for the New Year) Challenge on DonationCoder. For those of us who aren't into fancy skins and prefer a more compact, clean, standard listview user interface, Trout is a breath of fresh air.

Trout has tons of features that one might expect in a serious audio player (lyrics, album art, etc.). But truthfully I don't care about or use such features. What I wanted to write about was how uniquely useful Trout is for listening to Audiobooks.

Why is Trout good for listening to Audiobooks?

Trout makes it really simple to load up a directory of tracks and sort by filename or track name, and makes it really easily to save and load playlists. Ok nothing special there -- but it's done well and no weirdness like the Microsoft Media Player where its hard to work with the song list or sort by different fields.

It has an option that will announce, using text-to-speech (or a simple tone), the audio file tracks as they are played. This can be incredibly useful in two situations when listening to audio books. First, it helps you remember which tracks you were last listening to when you went to sleep. And second, it helps you navigate tracks using the keyboard (media keys are supported) even when the monitor is off.

It has a very nice big track progress display that you can click on to easily jump around.

While these may seem like minor features -- they do make Trout the best audio player for audio books that i have found.

And of course, one of the best things is that if you make a feature request, it's very likely skwire will try to implement it.